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| Danger: Smart Parents With Data; Washington Post | |
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| Topic Started: Apr 3 2009, 09:08 AM (51 Views) | |
| IlikeLIvonia | Apr 3 2009, 09:08 AM Post #1 |
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Danger: Smart Parents With Data By Jay Mathews Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 24, 2004; 9:18 AM Karen Budd is one of those parents that school administrators try to avoid. To begin with, she understands math, having a bachelor's degree in the subject, plus some graduate work in engineering, from the University of Pittsburgh. Every school superintendent who has ever attended a PTA meeting knows the math-savvy parents are the worst. They often have complaints about the way teachers are handling the subject. And the average administrator, having like me successfully avoided taking any math since high school, knows he is ill-equipped to defend himself. Adding to the troublesome nature of Karen Budd is her early and unhappy experience with Everyday Math, one of the modern conceptual textbook series favored by many experts in mathematics education. It is distressing to her that Fairfax County, where she lives, in the last two years added Everyday Math to some of its schools. I sympathize with those who have to answer Budd's letters. I would not be any better equipped to argue with her than they are. But I think parents like her are an important part of the effort to make schools better, and we ought to remember that they are becoming even more influential as we hand them a whole new generation of weapons -- the results of all those achievement tests the state and federal governments are making the schools give our children. Take as an example what Budd has done with some new testing data sitting out there in cyberspace, ready for use. She looked at two large and important Washington area school districts, Anne Arundel and Fairfax counties, which are using different textbooks in their math programs. She says she has found a remarkable discrepancy in results. Like all such statistical arguments, this math gap is full of qualifications and limits and confusing twists, and many educators insist it does not exist at all, but I want to display her conclusions as a sign of what other parents might want to try, and as a warning to administrators that they are going to have to pay more attention to such comparative figures themselves, if only for their self protection. Budd's research project was motivated by what she says happened to her children when they encountered Everyday Math at a private school. "At first blush," she said in a letter to a superintendent who was using the program, "my instincts told me it was not rigorous enough, nor content rich. However, I decided at the time to be deferential to the educators and accepted the program assuming that educators knew more about mathematics education than I." "I rue the day that I accepted it without question and that I did not investigate further. My children's days were to be filled with counting on a scroll to 1,000,000 and playing games. Addition and subtraction facts were not emphasized properly. Fractions in the 5th grade were glossed over. These should have been major red flags to me as these skills are all very critical to success in algebra. It should have occurred to me that whoever wrote this program had a significant deficit in understanding or remembering advanced mathematics and in knowing what it takes for children to be successful in advanced mathematics." Since then, she said, she has spent many summers helping her older daughter, Katie, fill the mathematical void left by Everyday Math. For her daughter, there is a happy ending -- she heads off this month to Grove City College to major in mechanical engineering. Budd, however, said she is concerned about other children whose parents have neither the education nor the means to tutor or have their children tutored. Budd pulled her younger daughter Kelsey out of the school that was using Everyday Math when she was in second grade. Budd said her mathematical gaps were much less severe and easily filled in by Fairfax County public schools' more traditional math curriculum at the time. When Budd discovered Fairfax County was planning to install Everyday Math in at least five schools, she decided to take her concerns to school officials. She looked for examples to buttress her beliefs. Although she had not lived in Anne Arundel, she was impressed with the progress it made using Saxon mathematics, a more traditional textbook series that has been successful in many schools and decided to compare that to what progress Fairfax had made with its curriculum. Here is one of the charts she created on the Anne Arundel experience and another on the Fairfax results: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28057-2004Aug24.html Three other charts can be found on the Web at this site under the title "Why Anne Arundel Scores Went Up"). Four charts appear to show Saxon raising scores substantially in Anne Arundel. The fifth chart shows what appears to be less improvement in Fairfax County's lowest performing elementary schools over four years. They did not use Everyday Math, which has just been adopted in the county, but they also did not use Saxon, despite pleas from Budd and other parents that they do so. Tim McEwen, president and chief executive officer of Austin, Tex.-based Harcourt Achieve, which sells the Saxon series, said, "It is not surprising that Anne Arundel County saw a dramatic increase in test scores." John Saxon, a former military officer who created the textbooks, "discovered a way that builds skills in an incremental manner, with frequent repetition, leading to an understanding of mathematical concepts and the connections between them," he said. April Hattori, vice president for communications at New York City-based McGraw-Hill Education, publishers of the Everyday Math series, strongly disagreed with Budd's and McEwen's analysis. She said the data in the charts is distorted and misleading and "Everyday Math has achieved significant documented results in school districts across the country." In Dallas, for instance, the percentage of students passing the state math test rose in all elementary schools after Everyday Math was introduced, she said, with the biggest gain in fourth grade, from 65 percent passing in 2000 to 75 percent passing in 2001. When Budd presented her analysis of the data to a meeting of the Fairfax County Math Curriculum Advisory Council in March, she got a cool reception. Budd said one young teacher working at a low-income school said "with pride how the teachers read the word problems for the kids and even write down for the children the 'very exciting' thought processes that the children go through to come up with an answer, not necessarily the right one." The fact that Everyday Math had previously been used in Anne Arundel, and was about to be used in Fairfax, to help low-income children was troubling to Budd, since she thought it would not work for kids whose parents were not good at math. Kitty Porterfield, spokeswoman for the Fairfax County public schools, said the Anne Arundel and Fairfax data used by Budd are measuring different things, percentile rank in Anne Arundel and percent scoring at or above the 50th percentile in Fairfax. She said if Fairfax's data were arranged the same way as Anne Arundel's, its students would also have shown "an impressive gain." Anne Arundel County officials said Everyday Math appears to have been only a minor part of the math curriculum in its lowest performing schools. (Hattori said total sales of the program in the county since 1998 "are about $30.") Anne Arundel spokesman Jonathan Brice said the county is "guardedly optimistic" about the success of its math courses and is looking forward to improving the learning of all students in all subjects. Budd said that when she displayed at the advisory council meeting her chart showing the gain in computation skills among Anne Arundel students using Saxon, the reaction from the teachers in the room was that that was only computation. "So I showed the problem solving charts and then, guess what . . . we heard how testing is not authentic," she said. "I do this," she said, "because having become so involved with my own kids and having done exhaustive research, mostly because I never believed my own instincts, I now feel responsible to bring these results to light -- for the kids it would benefit and for the taxpayers who are being squeezed by this county for pretty average results." See what I mean? Educators do not like hearing parents talk that way, but they ought to get used to it. These arguments used to be just opinions, tossed back and forth like water balloons on a college weekend. Now, with so much testing going on, and so much information on the Internet, both parents and teachers have facts to present, and everyone is going to have to listen more carefully. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28057-2004Aug24.html Edited by IlikeLIvonia, Apr 3 2009, 09:22 AM.
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| IlikeLIvonia | Apr 3 2009, 09:37 AM Post #2 |
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Much-Used Elementary Math Program Gets Qualified Nod From U.S. Ed. Dept. By David J. Hoff September 19, 2006 A popular K-6 math curriculum has shown promise for improving student achievement but needs more thorough study before it can be declared effective, a federal research center reported last week. For More Info A review of research on "Everyday Mathematics," including a link to the complete report is posted by the What Works Clearinghouse at the U.S. Department of Education. Everyday Mathematics, which is used by 3 million U.S. students in 175,000 classrooms, was deemed to raise students’ test scores by an average of 12 percentile points in a review of four studies reanalyzed by the What Works Clearinghouse at the U.S. Department of Education. Those gains are “pretty strong,” said Phoebe Cottingham, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, which oversees the clearinghouse. But she said the curriculum could not receive the clearinghouse’s top ranking because none of the research conducted on it was a large-scale study that compared achievement among students who were randomly assigned either to the program or to a control group. For the review, a team of clearinghouse researchers analyzed 62 studies on the impact of Everyday Mathematics, which was developed at the University of Chicago in the 1980s and is now published by the New York City-based McGraw-Hill Cos. Of those studies, just four met the clearinghouse’s quality criteria and underwent more analysis by its researchers. Of those four, three studies found “positive” effects, but just one detected improvements in students’ math achievement that were considered statistically significant. The fourth study found no effect on test scores. Based on those results, the report said the curriculum has “potentially positive effects,” the second-highest category on its ranking scale. “The ranking underscores the stellar results [Everyday Mathematics] has had in the marketplace for over 20 years,” said Mary Skafidas, a spokeswoman for the McGraw-Hill Cos. Everyday Mathematics is used widely across the country, including in most of the elementary schools in the 1.1 million-student New York City public school system, the nation’s largest. In 1999, a federal panel of curriculum experts named Everyday Mathematics one of five math curricula with “promising” potential based on how well their materials aligned with national math standards. That list was later criticized by a group of mathematicians because they say programs it recognized failed to teach students basic math skills. The current effort to evaluate programs’ effectiveness is hampered by a lack of high-quality studies published in academic journals and other places, some analysts say. “It’s underwhelming the number of good studies done in math,” Ms. Cottingham said. “It’s a reflection on the past state of education research.” The What Works Clearinghouse is the Education Department’s attempt to identify effective curricula and programs based on reviews of research. Previously, it has released evaluations of middle school math curricula and character education programs. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2006/09/20/04math.h26.html?qs=much+used+elementary+math+program Edited by IlikeLIvonia, Apr 3 2009, 09:45 AM.
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